The key to shopping without barriers lies in AI-powered commerce

By Al Williams, VP of Market Strategy at Commerce

Most e-commerce journeys are still built around the assumption that everyone shops in the same way. They don’t. Many customers report frustration when brands fail to deliver personalised experiences. High cart abandonment is driven in large part by unnecessary complexity that forces shoppers to process more information before making a decision.

Those numbers are bad for any shopper. For disabled customers, neurodivergent shoppers, people with lower confidence, or anyone who simply prefers a different style of interaction, the gap between the experience that exists and the one they need is far wider. Ecommerce has an inclusion problem. AI, specifically agentic tools, is one of the more credible paths to solving it.

There is no such thing as the average shopper

Widespread inaccessible checkout journeys and disabled customers regularly abandoning purchases because of an accessibility barrier are not edge cases. They represent a material share of purchasing intent that never converts.

Inclusion extends beyond accessibility in the clinical sense. Some shoppers want guidance and reassurance throughout a journey. Others want speed and independence. Introverted customers may actively avoid the social pressure of in-store interaction.

Ecommerce has largely asked them to conform to how retailers organise their products. That’s the wrong starting point.

The personal shopping assistant, reconsidered

Traditional AI tools answer questions. Agentic tools do something more useful: they understand goals, evaluate options, and take action on a shopper’s behalf.

A shopper dealing with arthritis doesn’t search “easy to put on trainers.” They explain their situation: what they struggle with, what comfort means to them, what they’ve already tried. An AI agent that can understand the underlying need, not just the keywords, and return relevant recommendations filtered by budget and availability, compresses a genuinely difficult shopping task into something manageable.

Over time, these agents learn. Previous interactions, preferences, and purchasing behaviour improve the relevance of what gets surfaced. Personalisation becomes something closer to real-time context. When a shopper feels understood, they convert. They return. They make fewer unnecessary returns.

Adapting to the shopper, not the other way around

“Traditional” direct to consumer ecommerce is built around how retailers organise products, mirroring a physical store or catalogue; organised by category. Agentic commerce inverts that. The experience adapts around the consumer, with the goal being an outcome, not the navigation of a storefront.

Shoppers are more willing to explain specific requirements, ask questions that might feel awkward in person, or seek reassurance at each stage of a decision. That psychological dynamic has real commercial implications. Lower pressure means higher confidence. Higher confidence means higher conversion.

What this requires from retailers

The opportunity is real. So are the conditions required to realise it. Trust and transparency aren’t optional components of an agentic commerce experience; they’re what makes the shopper willing to engage with it. That means being clear about how data is used, keeping the shopper in control of the final decision, and building experiences that genuinely adapt rather than ones that simulate adaptation.

The retailers who get this right won’t just serve a broader range of customers. They’ll build the kind of loyalty that comes from making someone feel, for the first time, that a shopping experience was actually designed with them in mind.